Is It Spring Yet?
by The Divine Comedian
Summary: Some PollyxMal fluff for the holidays. Polly and Mal share a few short hours away from the army life and for some reason discuss fire safety. Based on Hugger-Of-Trees' ficverse, with permission.


Meta fan fiction! Playing around in **Hugger-Of-Trees**' ficverse, namely _What Polly Did Next: Winter_ and _The Army Field Guide to Under-Wiring_. Can be read on its own, but is somewhat spoilery for both. I asked permission, so there :D

Warning: this is what happens when I attempt fluff (and I mean it. There was one single angsty line. I took it out. Hope you're all happy.) Polly/Mal, rated T for being shippy fluff with hardly any clothes on. Merry winter holiday of your choice :D

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**Is it spring yet?**

The evening light slipped away from the small store room in a slow wave. Polly found it unfair. What with the fire from the grate all but gone, she couldn't actually see much anymore. And the view had been really interesting, too! And she'd only had a couple short hours to properly appreciate it. Completely unfair.

"Mal," she said. The vampire lay, improbably but undeniably so, still in her arms. For all her superhuman reflexes, she now appeared slow and sated, reminding Polly of a cat on a hearth. "Mal!" She poked. It had a much better effect if the recipient wasn't actually wearing very much in the way of clothes.

Of course, the one or other garment had remained between them, the operation not having been one of their most thoroughly planned or meticulously carried out. Polly herself was still wearing her knee-highs. Her toes at least were pretty toasty.

"Hang on a sec, sarge," said Mal, suddenly squirming out of Polly's grip, reaching for her trousers that lay a good distance from their shared mattress. She felt through a pocket, then reappeared in Polly's field of view with a pouch of tobacco and a box of matches. Lying on her stomach, she began idly rolling another of her perfect cigarettes, casually demonstrating to Polly her flawless night vision and mindfulness in the aftermath of earth-shattering events.

It was also much more strenuous now to continue mussing her hair, a task that Polly had carried out previously with considerable enthusiasm. Instead she experimentally drew a thumb along a bony spine, trying to break the concentration that she found so out of place. The effect was minuscule enough for Polly to swear she was going to find a way to disrupt the mechanisms of Mal's various addictions.

"You were saying?" said Mal, striking a match. The flame lit her features for a moment and Polly drank in the vision before her while parts of her were laughing at other parts of her for being in an outrageously sappy mood. How can you drink a vision, said the parts. The woman is reasonably attractive and that's all there is to it.

"I was going to say bet you're feeling damn silly now," said Polly. "For being such a presumptuous arse and getting it wrong." She wondered for a moment whether the setting was entirely appropriate for this kind of speech. But Mal _had_ called her _sarge_, thus appropriateness had already proved to be flexible. "But now," she added, "I'm going to say bet you're going to feel damn silly when you've burned this damn fort down, and everyone in it. On top of the previous silliness, not instead."

"Huh?" said Mal, rolling over to lie on her back, her hair again being within reach for another go at the tousling. She took a deep drag, exhaled. Polly thought of how she'd washed with real soap this morning. It had a vaguely flowery scent, thanks to Shufti's taste. And now Mal was covering it all up in tobacco smell. Maybe, for a vampire in an army fort, the smoking was a measure of self defense?

"Smoking onna hay mattress," said Polly. "Did you know they made me responsible for fire safety? Careful now," and with that she climbed over and took ahold of Mal's wrists, pinning them down with all her weight, cigarette and all, and pressed a lingering kiss on her mouth. She'd been surprised at her own boldness at first, but already appeared to get used to this, to doing all this and it being okay now. She loved it.

"See," said Mal, easily extricating her hands from Polly's grip (causing Polly to vaguely entertain the idea of chains) and inhaling again, blowing smoke in Polly's general direction, "nothing's burned down."

With the fire gone, it was much colder than it had been, and so Polly thought it was a good idea to maximise bodily contact by lying down completely on her companion, and tugging the discarded blanket over both of them. Her head fit perfectly into the space between angular shoulder and not-much-softer cheek (for a given value of perfectly that included a strand of hair tickling her eyelids). Hair or not, she dropped a kiss on that cheek because it seemed like a good idea.

"Pol, I'm not sure this is going to work out," said Mal.

"Is that so," murmured Polly. "I for one like it." Then her head shot up. "What?"

"I need somewhere to stub out this cigarette when I'm done with it," said Mal, "so as to minimise the fire hazard. You are between me and my ashtray and I can't be arsed to lift you."

"What the hell, you're not even done yet," said Polly, who'd grown rather attached to her new hot water bottle and was never gonna give it up. Her hand reached for the matches, and, perhaps to increase the quickly dropping temperature in the store room, she lit one, propped again on her elbows.

Looking over Mal slowly, until the flame scorched her fingertip, she said, "You _are_ pretty." She threw the match away into the general direction of the grate, then let her fingers slide over what Mal somewhat previously had called her female accoutrements.

In the once again darkness, she heard Mal snort. "You forgot that I'm intellectual and smell nice." The glowing cigarette provided very little illumination, but there was an audible and satisfying gasp when Polly pinched a strategic piece of skin.

"PS, I do not feel silly about anything," said Mal, when she had regained control over her voice once more. "Vampire thing, deal with it."

"Really," said Polly. "Not even the complicated underwear? I would."

"Haha, very funny," said Mal. "You liked it."

Polly felt it superfluous to point out that the actual enjoyment had unfolded while getting the dratted thing off Mal.

"And it's not that complicated," said Mal. "Did it come with a diagram? No? Not complicated. Just trust me on this."

"Bet you lost it," said Polly. "Bet you're going to ask me to help you put it on again."

"I might," Mal said, and while Polly was still mildly surprised at the concession, the vampire added something about having been perfectly able to dress herself without human help for years before Polly came along. Mal took Polly's hand, and too late Polly had realised the woman had placed the burning cigarette end between her fingers. "Can you reach the ashtray?"

Polly found she could, and stubbed it out. It appeared they were done here, she noticed. "Y'know," she said, "I really think we should try this again sometime soon."

Mal shrugged nonchalantly. "Glad it met your approval, sarge," murmured Mal, before pulling her back into a very thorough embrace that betrayed her disinterested tone. "Think we should get down?"

"We're not going to hear the end of it if we don't show up for the card game," said Polly.

Later, when she watched Mal lose round after round, Polly figured she'd done a good job.


End file.
